Aaron Swartz was easy to pick out of a crowd. I met him only once, at a 2010 gathering of legal academics organized by Larry Lessig at Harvard. In a room full of suits, Aaron wore a Google App Engine T-Shirt.

Unfortunately, Aaron's penchant for defying social convention may have been his undoing. He was arrested in 2011 for scraping articles from the academic archive JSTOR. Facing hacking charges that could put him in prison for decades, Aaron took his own life on Friday.

Aaron accomplished more in his 26 years than most of us will accomplish in our lifetimes. At the age of 14, he helped develop the RSS standard. He was an early member of the team that created reddit, which was sold to Condé Nast (Ars' parent company) before Aaron turned 20. Now independently wealthy, Aaron threw himself into political activism.

Aaron had long been acquainted with legal scholar and Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig. When Lessig shifted his focus from copyright reform to institutional corruption, Aaron became an enthusiastic supporter of Lessig's new cause. He joined the Safra Center for Ethics, which Lessig directed, as a fellow.

In late 2010, Aaron became incensed about a copyright proposal that would eventually become the Stop Online Piracy Act. He founded a group called Demand Progress, which became a key rallying point in the fight against SOPA. He and the team he assembled spent 2011 raising awareness about the problems with the legislation, building momentum for the January 18, 2012 protest that decisively killed it.

Guerilla open access

Aaron was passionate about public access to information and offended by public information being locked behind paywalls. One paywall that particularly irked Aaron was on PACER, the website the US judiciary uses to distribute public court records. The courts charged seven cents (eventually raised to 10) per page to access legal briefs, judicial opinions, scheduling orders, and other documents essential to understanding the judicial process.

So when the courts started a pilot program to allow free access to PACER from 17 libraries around the country, Aaron sprung into action. He visited one of the libraries and reverse-engineered the authentication process the library's computers used to bypass the paywall. Then he spun up some cloud servers and, using credentials purloined from one of the libraries, began scraping documents from PACER. He got more than 2 million documents before the courts noticed what was happening and shut the pilot program down. When I was in grad school at Princeton, some colleagues and I used the documents Aaron obtained as the foundation of RECAP, a Firefox extension to liberate court documents and store them in a public archive.

Aaron was also outraged about the high prices charged for access to scholarly publications. In a 2008 manifesto, he denounced the legacy system of academic publishing in which scholarly knowledge is locked up behind paywalls. "We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access," he wrote.

In the fall of 2010, Swartz engaged in a bit of Guerilla Open Access himself, logging onto MIT's network to scrape millions of academic papers from the JSTOR database. When MIT administrators booted his laptop off the Wi-Fi network, he entered an MIT network closet and plugged his laptop directly into the campus network.

The stunt got the attention of federal prosecutors, who arrested him and charged him with multiple counts of computer hacking, wire fraud, and other crimes. The feds ratcheted up the charges further in September. If convicted on all charges, he could have spent more than 50 years in prison.

We don't know the details of Aaron's death or why he might have taken his own life. In a comment on hacker news, Aaron's mother wrote, "thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful."

It's hard to imagine his looming prosecution wasn't a factor. In an anguished Saturday blog post, Lessig describes Aaron's predicament. He was facing a million-dollar trial in April, "his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge."

Whether or not it contributed to his suicide, the federal government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice. Aaron shouldn't have plugged his laptop into MIT's network without permission, but that's not the sort of crime that deserves a multi-year, to say nothing of multi-decade, prison sentence. We should pay tribute to Aaron's memory by reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to prevent such disproportionate prosecutions from happening in the future.

Sorry to hear that he thought this was the way out, but don't activists understand that not only what they do has consequences. The point of being an activist is the resulting fight (and winning) that reforms the system.

Sorry to hear that he thought this was the way out, but don't activists understand that not only what they do has consequences. The point of being an activist is the resulting fight (and winning) that reforms the system.

I wasn't aware you were intimate with the particulars of his situation that prompted him to take his own life.

We should pay tribute to Aaron's memory by reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to prevent such disproportionate prosecutions from happening in the future.

While I can understand this sentiment, who exactly is this "We"? Tech nerds who post in message boards? Somehow I doubt that will be enough to sway politicians who are funded by companies that will give firm (if imaginary) numbers on monetary and job losses and who are voted for by people who aren't tech nerds. 'Freedom!' is really an empty cry unless one has numbers, either economic or political, to support it.

What does society gain by 'freeing' PACER records and academic papers? What are the costs of 'freeing' PACER records and academic papers? Will 'freeing' academic papers lead to more ground-breaking research? Or will it lead to more muddling of science of the kind that Johm Timmer likes to write about? Will 'freeing' legal documents expose corruption or non-uniformity in sentencing in the justice system? What, for example, did your RECAP extension accomplish, if anything?

Giving concrete answers to these sorts of questions will do far more good than ideological arguments about information 'wanting' to be free or how taxpayers 'deserve' to get access to taxpayer-funded academic research.

I hope they're REAL PROUD having driven a brilliant man to commit suicide over a non-violent (made up) crime with zero financial gain.

Financial gain, no, but last time I checked breaking into a secured room and accessing a network without permission isn't a made up crime. If I broke into your house and accessed your network and broke your bandwidth cap, causing you to incur a fine, you would be upset would you not?

Obviously the bigger picture of the prosecution and what he was charged with is disproportionate and seems to be retaliatory for his past activities, or otherwise some kind of attempt to send a message (don't know what the message was), but Schwartz absolutely deserved to be prosecuted for trespassing and probably for accessing the network without permission.

I hope they're REAL PROUD having driven a brilliant man to commit suicide over a non-violent (made up) crime with zero financial gain.

Financial gain, no, but last time I checked breaking into a secured room and accessing a network without permission isn't a made up crime. If I broke into your house and accessed your network and broke your bandwidth cap, causing you to incur a fine, you would be upset would you not?

Obviously the bigger picture of the prosecution and what he was charged with is disproportionate and seems to be retaliatory for his past activities, or otherwise some kind of attempt to send a message (don't know what the message was), but Schwartz absolutely deserved to be prosecuted for trespassing and probably for accessing the network without permission.

According to the quoted URL blog post:

"Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron."

I hope they're REAL PROUD having driven a brilliant man to commit suicide over a non-violent (made up) crime with zero financial gain.

No financial gain for him, certainly, but bear in mind that there was a real cost to MIT resulting from his actions. Specifically, JSTOR cut the campus off from access for a while, which means that any number of people who legitimately used MIT's campus subscription to JSTOR were unable to do so until things were sorted out. As a (not-at-MIT) academic myself, I can tell you that losing, however temporarily, access to a wide swath of journals would definitely impact productivity (it's a necessary piece of infrastructure to do my job). Multiply that by the umpteen thousand people on the MIT campus who similarly need such databases, and you're suddenly talking big numbers in lost productivity.

A crime worthy of decades in prison? No, not even close. But please let's not assume that this was just a harmless little lark with no costs associated with it.

What does society gain by 'freeing' PACER records and academic papers?

Informed discourse. Antiscience is freely available. It's easy to get access to second hand analyses of papers, especially from the 'debunker' crowd. I'm lucky enough to have free access to full publications through my university and can actually check what's said in media against what's said in the paper- they rarely align perfectly. Other people don't have that option, which must suck for them.

Secondly, a reasonable amount of what I've learned in my undergrad came from reading papers. A better informed, more educated population is a good thing.

Whether or not it contributed to his suicide, the federal government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice. Aaron shouldn't have plugged his laptop into MIT's network without permission, but that's not the sort of crime that deserves a multi-year, to say nothing of multi-decade, prison sentence.

I'm sorry, what?

You can't have "a grotesque miscarriage of justice" until there has been a verdict. Until there's been a trial with a verdict, there hasn't been justice yet. It was for a judge and jury to decide if such charges were legitimate under the law and given the evidence. If he was found guilty on all counts, then, and only then could you claim that it was a miscarriage of justice.

This is a sad story, but let's not get too carried away with our emotions here. It's a tragedy that Swartz couldn't find the strength within himself to push through this period and face what was coming. But that doesn't mean that the justice system failed in some way; it hadn't even started yet.

It's unfortunate that he thought this was the last option available for him.

However, suicide is not a logical argument in and of itself. It doesn't justify anything, and at best, it's an emotional plea to those who already partial.

Emotion bests logic every time, we are humans not computers.

Actually, this makes me very against anything he stood for. It's a poor way to avoid the issue, and, to me at least, says he didn't believe in what he claimed to.

Bullshit.

What it means is that he's a person, nothing more. A human being who's affected by what happens to him. That he couldn't see it through to the end is a tragedy, but that doesn't mean he's a "poser" or that he didn't believe what he claimed do. It only meant that he couldn't accept the pain that he felt within his daily life in the direction it was going in.

Whether or not it contributed to his suicide, the federal government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice. Aaron shouldn't have plugged his laptop into MIT's network without permission, but that's not the sort of crime that deserves a multi-year, to say nothing of multi-decade, prison sentence.

I'm sorry, what?

You can't have "a grotesque miscarriage of justice" until there has been a verdict. Until there's been a trial with a verdict, there hasn't been justice yet. It was for a judge and jury to decide if such charges were legitimate under the law and given the evidence. If he was found guilty on all counts, then, and only then could you claim that it was a miscarriage of justice.

This is a sad story, but let's not get too carried away with our emotions here. It's a tragedy that Swartz couldn't find the strength within himself to push through this period and face what was coming. But that doesn't mean that the justice system failed in some way; it hadn't even started yet.

This is ridiculous. Defending against a federal criminal prosecution costs more than a million dollars, not to mention the intrusiveness and stress of the legal process itself. Most criminal trials end in plea bargains because defendants aren't willing to roll the dice on a decades-long trial. So yes, prosecuting someone with felony charges for doing something that ought to be punishable by a modest fine is a miscarriage of justice. Even if he was eventually acquitted, it still would have been a miscarriage of justice.

It's unfortunate that he thought this was the last option available for him.

However, suicide is not a logical argument in and of itself. It doesn't justify anything, and at best, it's an emotional plea to those who already partial.

Emotion bests logic every time, we are humans not computers.

Actually, this makes me very against anything he stood for. It's a poor way to avoid the issue, and, to me at least, says he didn't believe in what he claimed to.

What if Nelson Mandela had just committed suicide, rather than go to jail? Ghandi? If you're going to do the deed, accept the penalty, or be seen as the poser you are.

I think you're entirely focused on the wrong thing, Turing also took his own life due to the horrendous and unfair treatment at the hands of the government, I doubt you'd find a single person who would call him a "poser" for not spending his life fighting his unfair treatment.

People take their own lives for different reasons, but it doesn't change who they were in the slightest. And Swartz was someone who was being unfairly punished despite his incredible brilliance and achievements (and that prison was hardly a good solution). We all lose in this situation, he lost the rest of his life, we lost another brilliant person on this planet at a way too young age.

Just because he committed suicide doesn't mean that his ideas were wrong.

It does mean he didn't truly believe in them, though.

There is no way that anyone here can know what was in this man's head before he took his own life. It's entirely possible that it is unrelated, it's entirely possible it wasn't suicide. We don't know. Making such a sweeping judgement like "it means he didn't truely believe what he said he stood for" when you only know the very basics of a situation from an article on a website is ignorant as hell at best and downright malicious at worst.

Until prosecutors are held accountable for "over-charging" defendants in bids to pressure them to plead guilty--and thus circumvent the justice system and its original intent of fair trials ending with just sentences for the guilty where the punishment fits the crime--this systemic abuse by prosecutors will continue. Unfortunately, the system encourages prosecutorial heavy-handedness because it makes prosecutors look "tough on crime" to an uneducated public and to unsympathetic special interests--and lightens their own overburdened workloads by encouraging plea-bargains. I recently read an article suggesting that the entire judicial system would grind to a halt with unconstitutional years-long backlogs if just 50% of defendants refused to plead guilty and demanded full trials.

I fear that, much as with the violent turn the civil rights movement took toward the end of the 1960s, something similar may happen in coming decades before prosecutorial reform is truly prompted.

Nothing of public record belongs behind paywalls. Taxes should be enough to cover the costs storage and bandwidth. In the grand scream the requirements of either just aren't that high.

Also, RIP =(

JSTOR isn't public record. Its a collection of copyrighted scientific journals. Not that the breaking and entering, copyright, wiretapping charges etc deserved 50 years (we'll never know what he would actually have been sentenced, but we can speculate that this was his motive).

Actually, this makes me very against anything he stood for. It's a poor way to avoid the issue, and, to me at least, says he didn't believe in what he claimed to.

What if Nelson Mandela had just committed suicide, rather than go to jail? Ghandi? If you're going to do the deed, accept the penalty, or be seen as the poser you are.

I cannot fathom the thought of spending the next 50 years in a locked closet, freedom denied. It's a highly personal choice, and one in which he deserved to make for himself not for the sake of others. Can you accurately predict how you would respond facing 50 years in prison for a non-criminal, activist crime ( while bank marauders, rapists and murderers run free)?

Whether or not it contributed to his suicide, the federal government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice. Aaron shouldn't have plugged his laptop into MIT's network without permission, but that's not the sort of crime that deserves a multi-year, to say nothing of multi-decade, prison sentence.

I'm sorry, what?

You can't have "a grotesque miscarriage of justice" until there has been a verdict. Until there's been a trial with a verdict, there hasn't been justice yet. It was for a judge and jury to decide if such charges were legitimate under the law and given the evidence. If he was found guilty on all counts, then, and only then could you claim that it was a miscarriage of justice.

This is a sad story, but let's not get too carried away with our emotions here. It's a tragedy that Swartz couldn't find the strength within himself to push through this period and face what was coming. But that doesn't mean that the justice system failed in some way; it hadn't even started yet.

This is ridiculous. Defending against a federal criminal prosecution costs more than a million dollars, not to mention the intrusiveness and stress of the legal process itself. Most criminal trials end in plea bargains because defendants aren't willing to roll the dice on a decades-long trial. So yes, prosecuting someone with felony charges for doing something that ought to be punishable by a modest fine is a miscarriage of justice. Even if he was eventually acquitted, it still would have been a miscarriage of justice.

Very soon I know I will no longer be able to stomach future comments to this article. Not only is the lack of empathy astounding and soul corrupting but I've already noted more "angst" regarding this situation than in regards to DoJ letting off HSBC for far more egregious actions.

I simply don't know how to cope with this level of inability to relate to another human being and not feel sick.

Academic knowledge should be open and available for free. There's no excuse.

In a utopia, yes, but in the real world who foots the bill for publishing? These journals aren't tax supported, they're subscription supported. Take away the subscription and you lose funding for the journal.

Academic knowledge should be open and available for free. There's no excuse.

In a utopia, yes, but in the real world who foots the bill for publishing? These journals aren't tax supported, they're subscription supported. Take away the subscription and you lose funding for the journal.

Most of the work is done by academics who volunteer their time. Typically the authors don't get a dime. And storage and bandwidth is dirt cheap. Thanks to the Internet there's no longer a bill that needs footing. There are only publishers trying to forestall their own obsolescence and irrelevance.

Timothy B. Lee / Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times.